Yes. Thanks for the link. I watched the video. Gorgeous results.
The farm I bought in '93 had a house built in 1787. At the time I didn’t appreciate it but the the former owner was more or less a man after the spirit of the book. Everything was done perfectly.
A week before we settled we were looking at some of the appliances and furniture he had for sale, and there was a backhoe in the yard digging up the pipe to carriage house. Apparently there had been a leak and he wanted to replace it before he sold it to us, so that everything was as it should be.
The house I live in now is a different story. It was built in the 1960s, to a very high standard. 7 years before we bought it an addition was put on. Apparently the owner had felt a great way to save money was to fire contractors halfway through and do the finishing himself. The upstairs was one single open space (no interior walls,) and he did the roofing himself, except he forgot to put in ventilation, so from exterior to interior it went: Shingles, tar paper, plywood, insulation between joists, ceiling drywall. The heat rotted the whole thing after we’d been there for 2 years. The whole top of the house needed to be replaced, including joists and rafters. It was about that time that the contractor started suggesting an engineer. Turns out that the interior walls that were ommitted were bearing walls. In order to make things safe we had to a steel pillar installed from the peak of the roof straight down through the 2nd floor, and through the first floor. A portion of the concrete pad had to be jackhammered away, and a hole dug in the middle of the living room, so that this pillar could have a proper support poured. Than a steel I-beam was installed on top of that to support the roof span. To stop the walls from falling outwards during the operation a 40 foot steel pole was installed betweeen them just below the slope of the ceiling.
The house was supposedly wired for cable, but we couldn’t make it work anywhere except in one room. There were outlets everywhere, but they were all dead. I must have spent hours every night for two searching for the mythical junction box where they met. Finally, through sheer persistence of effort I deduced that it simply had to be in this one area of this one wall. I had determined I would just have to cut into the drywall and start poking around until I found it. While running my stud finder over the walls, I noticed a soft spot in the wallpaper. “No way,” I thought. Sure enough it didn’t seem as if there was anything behind it. I cut through the wallpaper with an Xacto knife and there was the junction! He’d just wallpapered over it.
In the kitchen he’d run the wiring for the ceiling lights up through the ceiling, over the top of the house and then put the iceshield and shingles over that. While that’s an elegant solution for avoiding running wire through joists, it didn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
My most interesting experience was when we remodelled the kitchen. We had a huge island planned, with granite countertops. My very laid back contractor got nervous as hell about three days before the template was to be made. “Template man is coming,” he said. “We only have him for the one afternoon, and if he doesn’t like what he sees, he’ll just leave. He’s that kind of guy.”
It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me, until I understand that they were going to cut $10,000 worth of Dakota Mahogany granite based on this template of the counters drawn by template man, and it was important that it be perfect the first time since you just couldn’t uncut it once you’d cut it. Apparently, this guy was a legend. Anyway, Template Man showed up, a big fat guy in a dirty shirt. He stared at the cabinetry for a few minutes and then started to cut up some cardboard (each piece of which was apparently the exact same size as a standard granite slab.) He did this freehand, without measuring anything, and then put them on top of the cabinetry one by one. I’ll be damned if every single one didn’t fit perfectly. Cutouts for the sinks, faucets, disposal control, water filter, cooktop, every angle and every seem was perfect.
It was just about the most impressive thing I’d ever seen. We have about an acre of granite (three slabs.) The templates took him less than an hour.
I thought about that when I noticed your nice (corian?) countertops on a similar island.
More pics por favour?